of voters, and also because of its favorable effect on those composing these conventions and on public sentiment.
The idea of asking for recognition from a national political convention was first suggested to Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Miss Susan B. Anthony in 1868. By their protests against the use of the word "male" in the Fourteenth Amendment, as described in Chap. I of this volume, they had angered the Republican leaders, some of whom, even those who favored woman suffrage, sarcastically advised them to ask the Democrats for indorsement in their national convention of this year and see what would be the response. These two women, therefore, did appear before that body, which dedicated the new Tammany Hall in New York City, on July 4. An account of their insulting reception may be found in the History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II, p. 340, and in the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, p. 304. They, with Abby Hopper Gibbons, daughter of Isaac T. Hopper, and Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of Gerrit Smith, previously had sent an earnest letter to the National Republican Convention which had met in Chicago in June, asking in the name of the women who had rendered the party such faithful service during the Civil War, that it would recognize in its platform their right to the suffrage, but the letter received no notice whatever.
From that year until the present a committee of women has attended every national convention of all the parties, asking for an indorsement or at least a commendation of their appeal for the franchise. Sometimes they have been received with respect, sometimes with discourtesy, and occasionally they have been granted a few minutes to make their plea before the Committee on Resolutions. In but a single instance has any one of these women, the most eminent in the nation, been permitted to address a Republican convention—at Cincinnati in 1876. Twice this privilege has been extended by a Democratic—at St. Louis in 1876 and at Cincinnati in 1880. A far-off approach to a recognition of woman's claim was made by the National Republican. Convention at Philadelphia in 1872, in this resolution:
